I like to throw a little YA/Middle Grade lit into my reading diet every so often, and The Miscalculations of Lightning Girl, by Stacy McAnulty, fit the bill.

My twelve year old daughter actually got to the book first. She said “it was interesting. It was a good story.” Which isn’t very enthusiastic, but I interrupted her from doing something else to ask. She’ll tell me if she didn’t like a book.

I started it weeks after she’d finished it, when I was out of renewals at the library and was afraid I’d have to return it without reading it like I had to do with two other books sitting on my reading pile this month.

Appropriately, I read the first third sitting in a middle school/high school auditorium at one of my daughters’ stage rehearsals for a dance recital.

The book has references that make it current, without the characters talking about or using their smart phones all the time. In Middle Grade lit, all the character’s problems are so huge and mean everything, yet are completely manageable, at least from the perspective of adulthood. Reading it feels like a bit of an escape from grown up-scale problems.

The main character in Lightning Girl is a math genius by way of being struck by lightning as a child. There were a number of ways math played into the book as a result. Every time a number was mentioned, it was written like this: “the only 1” and “You said I wasn’t the 1st freak to feel out of place at school.” I’m a stickler for English usage, and there are rules about when you write a number as a word and when you use digits, and the book broke all the rules in the name of … math. If I were a middleschooler, would I would slouch and roll my eyes? Or think it was cool? Grown up me was annoyed by it; maybe it felt too obvious to be clever.

There was some advanced math referenced in the book, but you had the sense the author knew something about what she was talking about and wasn’t just bluffing while dropping “trig” here and “calculus” there. The author explains pi and the Fibonacci sequence in more detail in a short section in the back.

And all the math was a vehicle to tell a story about friendship, fitting in, dealing with change, and growth. Annoying use of digits aside, it worked.

I wouldn’t want to read Middle Grade lit all the time. It can be cloying and self indulgent, although adult lit can be, too (I’m looking at YOU, Eat, Pray, Love). But there is something about going back in time to when the most pressing issues were math quizzes and whether or not you could trust your BFF with your biggest secret. There is a tween inside of us all who can enjoy a bit of that from time to time.